The first is O-scape, a set of orienteering-map styles and functionality supplied as a plugin for Inkscape, which is the open source equivalent of Adobe Illustrator (the latter has the Map Studio plugin which I have used to create maps.) If O-scape is as functionally rich as MapStudio, and Inkscape is as capable as Illustrator, then I am planning on migrating my Illustrator maps over – the fully human-readable, flexible SVG format would be a big win. Inkscape is cross-platform (including Linux) and most importantly of all is completely free and open-source.

The second is GhettOCAD, an iPhone/iPad app that allows you to draw orienteering maps electronically as you walk around them! It’s in alpha-stage development at the moment, but could be very interesting.

A killer app would be mixing the two together – O-scape on an iPad. Now there’s a thought!

The courses were TCX files, generated at BikeRouteToaster using the routing supplied by Google Maps and Cloudmade (OpenStreetMap data) – I alternated between the two depending on which showed the best looking cycle routes or most complete coverage of country lanes. Google’s road coverage is more complete but it’s API can (currently) only route journeys based on rules optimised for cars. OpenStreetMap still has big gaps in coverage in parts but is pretty good and showing dedicated cycle paths, in particular the flat (a luxury in Devon/Cornwall!) “rail trails”.

The first day’s route, as viewed in BikeRouteToaster

The TCX files are XML and are made up of two parts – the route itself, which is represented on the Forerunner unit itself as a meandering line, and turn indicators, which are derived from the data and in most cases are right – a spurious “straight on” indicator often appears when the country lane changes name, but most junctions are detected, apart from where the main road typically turns and the minor road carries straight on. This does result normally in a couple of unplanned detours, particularly for very shallow junctions where both the road and the junction turn in similar directions, where the route line does not help, but in general it means you can do a complete cycle without having to get a map (or smartphone) out at every junction.

One problem is restricted memory in the Forerunner 305, and that the use of this limited space doesn’t necessarily correspond the size of the data in the TCX files. For example, the turn directions took up around 10% of the space of the route lines in my TCX file, but appeared to take up double the space of the route lines on the device. By removing turn directions from the TCX files, reducing their files sizes by only 10%, I was able to store more than double the number of route lines.

The first day’s route in Garmin Training Center, before and after the turn directions were removed.

Older versions of the Garmin Training Center (sic) application, used to upload the TCX files, would fail silently, without loading all the files, when the memory limit was reached, and the current web-based uploader tool also gives an unobvious error message when the device runs out of space on uploading. However, the latest version of Garmin Training Center includes a pre-processing tool that examines the TCX files and only lets you upload files which collectively don’t exceed the limit – using checkboxes a useful “full bar” indicators. With this, I was able to see what files I could include, and that by removing the (relatively small sized) turn indicators, I was able to load in almost all 10 days worth of files.

The Garmin Training Center upload screen, before and after the removal of the turn-based directions, showing the difference it makes to the capacity used on the device (A striking difference, given that the turn-based directions only take up ~10% of the original TCX XML file.)

While being plugged into the charger, the unit would operate fine – although when charging, the “Charging in Progress” would always switch to “Charging Complete” after around five seconds, and on unplugging the charger, the unit would switch off immediately, indicating the battery was completely uncharged.

Scanning various web forums talking about such issues, the soft or hard resets, or a firmware software downgrade/upgrade, were the standard fixes – having tried all of these, it looked like my only solution would be sending the unit back to Garmin for an out-of-warrenty replacement. Apparently, some forums said, they are willing to do this for free, with a quick turnaround, due to a “known manufacturing fault”.

I need my Garmin fixed for Thursday, when it has to navigate me 1000km from Land’s End back to London, so that return-to-manufacturer wasn’t an option. Thankfully, I was able to solve the problem with a little prodding around inside the case.

The Forerunner 305 case is pretty easy to open up, as there are no screws for clips holding the front and the back together – just some weak glue. Prising the two parts apart with a small kitchen knife was straightfoward to do, and on examining the interior, the problem was obvious.

There are eight brass pins on the inside back part of the unit, on the other side of the case from the four charging/communicating contacts that connect to the docking station. The pins are bent back on themselves to provide a hinge to the corresponding eights contacts on the inside front part. The left-most metal pin was completely corroded and had gone green, presumably due to an electrolysis reaction with some water or sweat that had got in the case. Not all of the eight pins are connected to the four charging contacts – the affected one wasn’t, which was why communication with the docking station was working fine. However, this was presumably one that was connected to the battery, which was why the battery was unable to charge.

On touching the corroded pin, the raised section immediately came apart (not good.) After cleaning the gunk away with a pencil eraser, I used the kitchen knife to gently prize the remaining slab under the pin upwards, and bent it back on itself, so that it formed a new, shorter pin. I then put the case back together, joining the two halves with sellotape (for now – I need some silicon glue to make a good fit) and the unit now started charging normally, and appears to work fine.

The service uses rectangular bounding boxes to show the discrepancies. Initially I thought this would not work well, as streets that are aligned north-south or diagonally would dominate compared with streets aligned to the east-west axis, but actually it visually works well, regardless of the orientation.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for a park of Hackney:

The light green square at the top is indicating “Chevet Street” – this is the OS Locator name, and clicking the road underneath the rectangle in the editor reveals it is called “Chevet Road” in the OpenStreetMap database. Similarly, the red square reads “Kemey’s Street”, while in OSM it is currently “Kemey Street”. The close in green on the right appears to be misnamed as an extension of the street it joins, while the two streets at the bottom aren’t named at all in OpenStreetMap – which is why they are also showing up as red in the editor. (The blue outline indicators one of the London Cycling Network routes, by the way.)

Time to get out on the streets and and clear these errors!

So, I ran my first marathon last Sunday – the Edinburgh Marathon. Although really it’s the East Lothian Marathon, as 19 of the 26 miles are outside the city, and along the East Lothian coastline. Still, the route goes past the village I grew up in, and the coastline is quite scenic.

It was a pretty hot and humid day and the heat really got to me after around 20 miles, but I just about managed to finish without stopping, mainly by running in any available shade, picking up extra water bottles off the road, and taking the pace right down.

The pain in the legs on finishing was noticeably more than any previous running event I’ve done, and the euphoria of finishing didn’t quite cancel it out… indeed it’s taken four days for the quads and hamstrings to stop hurting. My time – 3h 34m 22s (1003rd place out of about 9500 finisher) – was well outside where I would need to be for London (3h 10m) but, after a moment of possible madness last night, I have entered two more – the Lea Valley (Two To Go) Marathon in September, which helpfully finishes about a mile from my house and is very flat, and the Brighton Marathon in April next year, which looks nice and flat, highly organised (they are emulating London by the looks of things) and had rave reviews from almost everyone who ran it last year. Brighton’s also pretty easy to get to and from. I’m not planning on doing more than a couple every year – they aren’t very good for you, and the switch in training doesn’t help the regular running and orienteering.

So now I have a PB that I can aim to beat in the future, now that I know that I can run 42.2km without passing out – my longest training run having been 32.5km.

A friend, Ed, was also up for the weekend and finished in an impressive 22nd place – 2h 48. That’s one time that is definitely out of reach.

The course is most suited to people who like off-road as well as on-road running. The first 2km is on a tarmac’d track, the next 2km is on grass around the East Marsh, with a great view of the emerging Velodrome in the Olympic Park, and the southern edge of the main Marshes, and the final km is on a tarmac’d track beside the Lee Navigation Canal.

I’ll be helping out at the finish, rather than running it, as my legs won’t quite have recovered from last weekend’s marathon. Once I am back into running, the event should have excellent PB potential (if the grass doesn’t slow things down too much) as it is a completely flat course. Much as I like Finsbury parkrun, the hills do add a good 45 seconds to my run each time. I expect I will alternate between the two, though, as each has its charms.

If you are in south London, Crystal Palace is also starting a parkrun this weekend. Ironically, it’s now pretty easy to get to from Hackney, thanks to the new Overground service that runs from Dalston.

The brown areas shows the construction sites, most of which are for the Olympic Park, apart from the eastern area which is the Stratford City development and the southernmost area which is the Crossrail Pudding Mill Lane construction.

The main stadium is a rather unsteady oval, the media centre is the not-quite-rectangular building in the left-hand corner, the velodrome is the hexagon, and the aquatic centre is the diamond. These are all simplified shapes based on what I see, rather than any official plans. There aren’t any buildings yet for the athletes’ village (the fifth of the Big 5 permanent venues) or the Westfield Stratford City mega-development, just POIs. The roads are rather incomplete – although unlike the main venues, these might not be permanent. It’s about as complete as I can get it without privileged access to the site (unlikely) or tracing from detailed aerial or elevated imagery. There’s lots of such imagery out there – the official London 2012 blog has published quite a lot recently, as have some media.

So this is a plea to anyone owning such imagery – if they don’t mind it being used for OpenStreetMap data (i.e. happy to licence it under a Creative Commons Attribution licence) to let the OSM community use it for such purposes, so this high-profile site looks great and up-to-date on the map that everyone can use.

…or I could just wait until the park opens in two years time.

The day I chose ended up being a grey and cold Sunday – not great for taking photographs – but it was still very worthwhile touring the site. The tours are on a single-decker bus, with a Blue Badge guide giving an interesting narration. After being picked up from Stratford and given a fold-out map of the site, we were then driven right around the A12 to Hackney Wick and the northern plaza entrance, where the bus was subjected to an elaborate sniffer-dog search, presumably just for show as the bus had already done several other tours on the day – and because we had no such check on re-entering the site from the southern plaza. It was a good opportunity for a safety and security briefing, though. (The northern plaza is where building materials are generally delivered – workers arrive several miles away at the southern plaza, generally from a DLR station there.)

First up was the Velodrome, aka the Pringle because of the distinctive shape of its roof. It’s close to the northern edge of the site and is very visible from the A12. Beside it is a billboard with an illustration of how it will look when complete:

The Velodrome is one of the “Big 5″ construction projects for the permanent buildings, along with the stadium, aquatic centre, athletes’ village and broadcast centre.

We then headed south, passing the basketball venue, a temporary building which has appeared from nowhere in just one month – already the “crazy paving” white plastic cladding is going on:

The Olympic Park isn’t the only building project going on in the area – along with Crossrail, the other big construction site is for the Stratford City Westfield development, which is more advanced and is due to open next year. A giant pedestrian bridge is being built between the two, and there is also a link road – the “Western Access”. The boundary between the two, with construction in all directions, is marked by a blue box:

The stadium is visible from the northern section we were in, but the main construction road was blocked due to some temporary works on one of the many bridges bisecting the numerous rivers, canals and channels in the site:

So we headed back onto the A12, around to Stratford, and back into the site through the southern plaza, an electronic sign there showing an impressive safety record:

Firstly, we went up close to the stadium itself, the basic shape of which is complete. The black section is the “temporary” section, although it might be around for longer than planned after the Olympics depending on what the stadium gets used for:

We then went round to the eastern part of the site, where the aquatic centre is. On the way I spotted many of the road signs which have appeared on the site – as well as Olympic Gardens North and South, and Stadium Crescent East and West, I had earlier spotted Handball Way, Handball Approach, Velo Drive, Stadium Aquatics Link, Plaza Approach, Soc Highway, Waterden Road Works South, Wetlands Avenue East, H08 Diversion and the intriguingly named Norman Corner.

All of these signs are mounted on “permanent” metal signposts and look like regular street-name signs. Rather than also showing the first part of the postcode, and is traditionally done for London street-name signs, these signs include reference numbers starting with “TR”. (Trunk road?) I’ve added all the names I spotted to OpenStreetMap.

The aquatic centre is being built by first placing the roof on its supports, and then filling in the space beneath it. The dramatic Zaha Hadid wave shape of the roof looks brilliant up close:

From one angle, it appears to hang over one of the water channels:

From another, it looks like a futuristic space ship:

I headed back home along the Greenway, a raised route through the site, open to the public and the best way to see the site if you aren’t on the bus tour. Along the way, I noticed the mysterious concrete posts, that appeared a few months ago, have finally revealed their purpose – they are rather fancy signposts:

You can see more pictures I took in my Flickr album.